In this episode of the Smart Buildings Academy Podcast, we will teach you how to sell building automation solutions to commercial real estate in 2021.
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Phil Zito 0:00
This is the smart buildings Academy podcast with Phil Zito Episode 252. Hey folks, Phil Zito here and welcome to Episode 252 of the smart buildings Academy podcast. And in this episode, we're gonna be talking about a sales strategy for commercial real estate in 2021. You know, it seems like and it would be rightful for you to assume that it's going to be harder to sell to commercial real estate right now, right? People still are slow to reacting and reoccupying buildings, we've got increasing pressures of commercial real estate operators and property managers to just recoup all the money they haven't made over the past year. And then there we are asking them to spend money with us. But you may be surprised to find out that if you're dealing with Class A office space, the majority of those operators actually need to make improvements in order to get people to reoccupy their buildings. So in this episode, we're going to talk through a couple sales strategies that you can implement in order to sell to commercial real estate. This is going to be a part of an ongoing theme for our Fridays, we're going to be having sales focused podcasts, those will be Fridays. And as I mentioned, Mondays will be a technical topic. And Wednesdays will be a how to topic our episodes will be a little shorter now about 15 minutes each, and you'll be getting more content because you'll be getting three podcasts a week. Everything I discussed can be found at building or rather smart buildings Academy home was went old school on you all there I almost went back to building automation monthly Holy moly. No podcast dot smart buildings academy.com forward slash 252. So with that being said, let's dive in to selling commercial real estate in 2021. Alright, picture this, your commercial real estate operator, you haven't had income coming in because people have defaulted on leases. They just haven't been paying bills. You've had people who have left and have not reoccupied. So you're not at capacity, you've got all sorts of issues, your dollars per square foot have gone down. But yet, you hear all this IQ stuff. You have all these people who are at home with smart equipment, and you know, smart home experiences, and you want them to come back, travel through traffic, navigate the city, and reoccupy your building. What can you do? Well, in this case, my friends, building automation, actually can make a huge difference in customer experience, customer satisfaction, and customer safety. And I guess I should use the word tenant because we're talking about commercial real estate, but hey, whatever. So tenant satisfaction, right? So let's dive through each of these real quick and let's focus on tenant safety. First, you know, one of our customers is the city of Austin Convention Center, we deal with them from a educational perspective. And they will, or they are having potential occupants that are asking questions around IQ, right? And then we have other customers who are even a step further, their customers or their tenants are actually afraid of IQ. So how can we mitigate those fears? Well, the first thing we have to do whenever we're mitigating any fear, is we need to educate what is the likelihood of this fear what is being done to mitigate against this fear? You know, I used to be afraid of flying on planes. Even though I was doing 100,000 miles domestic a year, I would be terrified of planes. But when I started to actually do research and learn how planes generate left, how they have redundant systems, all the fail safes that go in, how they can glide, etc, etc, I started to feel more comfortable with flying almost the same thing. What we can do is building automation professionals is not only can we go to our customers, and offer a retrofit solution that will go and improve their IQ by going and making changes to their building automation control strategies. But if we really want to get ahead of the curve, if we will really want to add a value
or provide a value add to our customers, what we can do is we can actually go and provide a qualitative piece to IQ. This is helping them come up with signage, helping them come up with paper communications about The IQ efforts they're making, helping them create a dashboard that sits in the lobby that says, This is what ASHRAE recommends, this is what we have. And this is what it means to kind of red, yellow, green, to make people feel comfortable with the environment of the building. And the nice thing about doing that is once you've done the legwork to do that, once you can take it to the rest of your commercial real estate customers, it really doesn't change. So you do the qualitative effort once and I think this is something while it's not, I think that I know, this is something I see some of our top tier system integrators and contractors doing, they're building up these qualitative education and engagement packages, and then they are bringing them to their customers as a bundled offering. And they build it once and then they can sell it forever. It's not like building automation, where you have to do it custom each time, right. So the next thing we can talk about is the experience of the tenant, you know, the ability that I can say the a word, I'm not gonna say it because I don't want it to go off. But I can say that a word it's a an ends with Lexa, right? So you can figure out what it is. But I can say that in turn on my office, I could turn on my TV, I can adjust all sorts of things within my house, yet, then they want me to go to a commercial office building, where I can't find my hotel space, I have no impact or control over lighting temperature, I like it ice cold, you know, why am I going to go work in a building that's trying to meet some green code and telling me I have to have the spaces 76. And I have to be miserable when I like it cold. And I can just do that from home. So how do we combat that? Well, we can give people the perception of control. And the perception of control is a kind of unique thing, right? It begins with actually building sequences and building use cases that make customers feel like the building is reacting to them. So for example, someone badges into a building, it identifies them via phone app or some other mechanism, maybe by badging, and it tells them hey, this, it sends out an email saying this is your space with maybe a link to a Google Map. And then you use Google floor maps to go and navigate. I know this sounds real space ag. And if I were in your shoes, I would feel a little uncomfortable. How do I sell this? How do I communicate this? How do I drive value from this? It's a little scary. And you're right, it is I get it? I don't disagree. But the thing is, if you're not having these conversations, eventually your competitors will be. So by getting in front of things with care, right? So initially, IQ is our quick hit thing, right? If we want to do work with Siri, this year, we're going to go hit IQ, that's what we're going to do. But if we want future work with Siri, we're going to think of some smart building use cases that engage tenants and increase the amount tenants want to be in the building. And then what we're selling is we're selling increase in dollar per square foot. Basically, the more tenants they can get in there, the more longer they can lock in leases. That is good for the commercial real estate, property manager and operator. So that's what we're selling. And that's what we're messaging. So I'm giving you kind of a quick hit, which is IQ I kind of middle of the road, which is going to be use cases, right? We're going to implement specific use cases. You all know if you've listened to this for any amount of
time, I like the parking management to access control to lighting the building automation use case, that's a nice one. I like the parking management to space reservation use case that's a nice one. So we can implement our use cases. And then the longer term thing that I want you to focus on right, so we've talked about IQ, we've talked about space and use cases, I want you to focus on utilization and asset analysis. And I want you to intermix that with retrofit analysis and retro commissioning. So it goes without saying in order to control IQ your systems need to work. And how do you know if your systems don't work? Well, you do a retro analysis. So you do a retro analysis, you site survey, we've talked about this a lot in past episodes. And then from that information, you're able to go and drive retrofit projects, you're able to make changes. But on top of that, what we can also do if we can start to get the appropriate data as we can understand space type utilization. You know, rather than going and building new buildings, a building operator would be better off to understand their utilization of their spaces, their traffic patterns. And then based on that do tenant finish outs and if you have the intelligence and the ability to help them analyze that data, then you can guide those capital or major retrofit projects and tenant finish out work. And with that work, you can then go and create work for yourself. This is more long term influence whereas the past two I talked about I aq most of that's going to probably run through an emergency budget or an operational budget, that tenant improvements that's going to run through capital budget, but they may have some are sorry, they use cases that will run through capital budget. But the actual case I'm talking through right now, it's all going to be Capital Planning and multi years out, so you want to get ahead of it. So those are the three things that I would focus on right now. If I wanted to sell to commercial real estate, I'd focus on IQ, intelligent use cases, retro site analysis, slash space utilization analysis to drive Capital Planning, I would avoid all the whiz bang technologies, they're going to be more difficult for you to be able to go and position and sell and they have more people on the it and other sides who could potentially say no, to your offering. Alright, folks, that's it for today. I'll see you on Monday. Thanks for listening, and have a great day. Take care.
